New SSD Coming to Market
Intel and Micron’s join venture into SSD technology is going to hit the market next year. They are already in production with 64 gig chips, and working to release 128 gig chips as well.
SSD technology is great for slow changing data. This is due to the fact that the SSD read/write cycle is greatly diminished from that of other types of data storage. The average number of erase cycles is 3,000 – 10,000 depending on the technology used.
That’s not many reads/writes for a bit of data. Still, this technology can be very useful. There are many applications where the value of a bit does not change as often as you might imagine. For this reason, you see tablets, phones, even laptop computers operating quite well with SSD technology. Performance degrades over time on the more volatile systems. I have a colleague who’s slowing laptop was restored to peak performance simply by replacing his SSD drive.
Now I am turning my thoughts towards the application of SSD to my favorite passion, databases. How would I improve my database performance with SSD technology? Clearly, unless I have an endless stream of capital, I don’t want to place my highly volatile data on SSD storage. But there is a lot of data in any database that is fairly static.
Creating separate files in your database, and hosting data that is primarily static on those files, could result in a big performance enhancement, without the failures experienced by those who put rapidly changing data on SSDs in the past.
For example, I would consider putting a slowing changing dimension of a data warehouse on an SSD, such as a Time Dimension. Reference tables that rarely change, and would not require defragmentation are another great choice. My strategy here is, put data on the SSD that may be written and left alone for a long time.
Archival data is another kind of data that may be stored on SSD. Consider data where you maintain a history. If you used a partitioned table, SSD storage can work nicely as well, since it doesn’t change historically. Again, the key is to use it for static data.
If SSDs become cheap enough, we may actually find we begin putting less static data for databases on them and plan to replace them more frequently than we would a hard disk.
Is SSD technology right for you? Why not drop me a note and let me know what you think? You may send your Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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